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John Loder (3 January 1898 — 26 December 1988) was a British-American actor. He was born William John Muir Lowe in London. His father was General W. H. M. Lowe, the British officer to whom Patrick Pearse, the leader of the Irish 1916 Rising in Dublin, surrendered. Both General Lowe and his son were present at the surrender of Pearse.
He was educated at Eton and the Royal Military College and followed his father into the army, commissioned into 15th Hussars as a second lieutenant on 17 March 1915, and then serving in the Gallipoli Campaign and at one point being imprisoned by the Germans.
Upon being released, he stayed in Germany to run a pickle factory and also began to develop an interest in acting, appearing in bit-parts in a few German films. He left Germany to briefly return to England and then headed to Hollywood to try his luck in the new medium, Talkies. He appeared in The Doctor's Secret, which was Paramount's first talking picture—though his very English persona didn't win America over at this time and he returned to England where he co-starred in plush musicals and intrigue such as Love Life and Laughter and Sabotage. He was the male romantic interest in the 1937 original film version of King Solomon's Mines.
When World War II started he returned to America where he seamlessly coasted into a career in 'B' movie roles usually playing upper crust characters with occasional appearances on Broadway. He occasionally did play roles, though supporting ones, in major 'A' films such as How Green Was My Valley, in which he was at the same time one of Roddy McDowall's brothers and Donald Crisp's sons.
In 1947 he became an American citizen, his last screen appearance was in 1971. In 1959 he became a naturalised citizen of the United Kingdom as he has been of "uncertain nationality".
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William B. Davidson (June 16, 1888 – September 28, 1947) was an American film actor.
Davidson attended Columbia University where he played football. He became a popular football star. This fame eventually led to his foray into motion pictures after he had spent some time as a lawyer. He started in films in 1914 with Vitagraph and supported well known stage and film actresses such as Ethel Barrymore, Mabel Taliaferro, Charlotte Walker, Olga Petrova, Viola Dana, June Caprice, Edna Goodrich, and Mae West. He appeared in 318 films between 1915 and 1949.
He was born in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and died in Santa Monica, California. His first Hollywood film was For the Honor of the Crew. Afterward, he appeared in many films, his best-known role was perhaps the Ship's captain in The Most Dangerous Game. He remained in show business until his sudden death after surgery in 1947.
Frederick Alvin Kelsey (August 20, 1884 – September 2, 1961) was an American actor, film director, and screenwriter. Kelsey directed one- and two-reel films for Universal Film Manufacturing Company. He appeared in more than 400 films between 1911 and 1958, often playing policemen or detectives. He also directed 37 films between 1914 and 1920. Kelsey was caricatured as the detective in the 1943 MGM cartoon Who Killed Who? directed by Tex Avery. He was born in Sandusky, Ohio and died at the Motion Picture Country Home in Hollywood, California, aged 77.
American character actor whose career lasted nearly half a century. James Wilson Flavin Jr. was the son of a hotel waiter of Canadian-English extraction and a mother, Katherine, whose father was an Irish immigrant. (Thus Flavin, well-known in Hollywood as an "Irish" type, was only one-quarter Irish.) Flavin was born and raised in Portland, Maine (a fact that may have enrichened his later working relationship with director John Ford, also a Portland native). He attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, but (contrary to some sources) did not graduate. Instead he dropped out and returned to Portland where he drove a taxi. Then as now, summer stock companies flocked to Maine each year, and in 1929 he was asked to fill in for an actor. He did well with the part and the company manager offered him $150 per week to go with the troupe back to New York. Flavin accepted and by the spring of 1930 was living in a rooming house at 108 W. 87th Street in Manhattan. Flavin didn't manage to crack Broadway at this time (his Broadway debut would not occur for another thirty-nine years, in the 1971 revival of "The Front Page," in which Flavin played Murphy and briefly took over the lead role of Walter Burns from star Robert Ryan). He worked his way across the country in stock productions and tours, arriving in Los Angeles around 1932. He quickly made the transition to movies, landing the lead in his very first film, a Universal serial, The Airmail Mystery (1932). He also landed his leading lady, marrying the serial's female star Lucile Browne that same year. However, the serial marked virtually the last time that Flavin would play the lead in a film. Thereafter, he was restricted almost exclusively to supporting characters, many of them without so much as a name. He specialized in uniformed cops and hard-bitten detectives, but played chauffeurs, cabbies, and even a 16th-century palace guard with aplomb. Flavin appeared in nearly four hundred films between 1932 and 1971, and in almost a hundred television episodes before his final appearance, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Francis Gary Powers: The True Story of the U-2 Spy Incident (1976). Flavin died of a heart ailment at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on April 23, 1976. His widow Lucile died seventeen days later. They were survived by their son, William James Flavin, subsequently a professor at the United States Army War College. James and Lucile Brown Flavin were buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.